Category Archives: Area Map

Regular readers of this blog, and researchers of local history, will be aware of the 1912 Goad’s Fire Atlas, which has been available in low-res images on the national archives website for the past few years.

As part of the fantastic digitization efforts undertaken by City of Vancouver Archives, the atlas is now available in much higher resolution as a layer on VanMap, the city’s on-line data pool of everything from lot sizes to zoning to dog parks.

Here is a map prepared by the City of Vancouver that shows almost all of Grandview in 1945.

This image is constructed from two maps (343.10 and 343.11) in the City of Vancouver Archives collection. The series of maps is captioned as being “hand coloured to show tax sale property for sale, property with no water, street widening and drainage, replotting, reserved land for schools, reserved land for parks, sundry land, capital assets not including schools and parks, schools, and parks, as applicable.” It is not clear what colours are meant to represent what item but, from other data I have collected, I would suggest that the houses marked in red were those in tax trouble.

As I am sure most of you already know, the present boundaries of Grandview Woodland are Clark Drive to the west, the inlet to the north, Nanaimo Street on the east and Broadway to the south. These boundaries were established in the late 1960s.

As local historian Bruce Macdonald has noted, the City has never produced a real map of Vancouver’s neighbourhoods. The various “neighbourhoods” — including Grandview Woodland — that are used by administrative agencies today were agreed to by the City in 1969 after a great deal of analysis on social service, health and education delivery by United Community Services (UCS, now known as United Way) in a period when Local Area control was all the rage (quite unlike today).

However, it took the UCS a while to get agreement from the local areas themselves. That’s because the map they produced was based entirely on theoretical calculations, breaking the city down into almost-equal population packages, with virtually no concern for social and historic considerations. For example, the following is the first map they proposed, in December 1966.

Quite a number of areas were eventually changed, but the proposal for Grandview seems the worst of all. Virtually none of the “Grandview” in this map is in the Grandview of today, taking over as it does what we know as Mount Pleasant.

The plan to link Strathcona and Grandview had been discussed throughout the 1960s but, luckily, the folks in the Woodland Park Area Resources Council — soon to be renamed the Grandview Woodland Area Council — wouldn’t have it and Grandview was quickly reestablished in its proper position.

Source of the 1966 map is B.W.Mayhew to UCS Local Area Councils, 8 Dec 1966, in CVA, Add Ms 981, 599-A-6, File 1

We are a few local historians and other interested people in the Grandview community of Vancouver working to identify, preserve, and celebrate the built, natural, and cultural heritage of Grandview and Commercial Drive. We meet on the third Thursday of the month at Britannia Community Centre. Please contact us at grandviewheritage@gmail.com for more information.